Temple Student Government will host its first community forum at the beginning of November, said Paige Hill, TSG’s vice president of external affairs.
This forum of students, North Philadelphia residents and TSG members will discuss the proposed on-campus stadium.
“We’ve made a lot of contacts with local residents, as well as block captains,” she said. “We have pretty consistent communication with the block captains and people who live in the area, so we plan on utilizing that network.”
There will be “at least two” additional community forums in the spring, Hill added.
Last year, TSG held community forums at the Amos Recreation Center on 16th Street near Montgomery Avenue. Hill wants to keep using it for meetings.
“We’re looking to figure out ways in which we can see how people on both sides are feeling,” she said. “We want to do it off campus so people can share their expressions freely.”
Jocelyn Marrow, an employee at Amos and block captain of the 1700 block of North 16th Street, said she hadn’t heard anything about TSG’s planned forums.
“I think it would be good to have a meeting [at the recreation center],” she said. “They need to make sure they have enough literature to pass around to the community to let them know it’s happening more than the day before the event.”
The proposed on-campus stadium will be the first topic of discussion because the university announced last week that it hopes to finish its feasibility study by the end of the calendar year.
“We also want to know firsthand how community residents are feeling about this,” Hill said. “We’ll couple their opinions with student opinion and try and find common ground that we can properly communicate to the administration.”
TSG plans to engage the surrounding community in other ways.
TSG hosted a Community Day at the start of the semester, but an Adopt-A-Block event co-organized with Temple Police was canceled last minute in September.
On Oct. 27, TSG will host a street cleanup event during Campus Sustainability Week, a series of events sponsored by the Office of Sustainability.
Hill also said TSG is in the process of planning a Pathways to Temple event in April. The series of events was created by last year’s administration and co-hosted by the Church of the Advocate on Diamond Street near 18th. It brings high school students from North Philadelphia on TSG-led tours of the university.
“I think that because we’ve been working with offices like [Temple Police] and Public Safety on a lot of issues that affect the community, there’s a good liaison between students, administration and people who live here,” Hill said. “I think that our working relationship with them is pretty set.”
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